New York Times launches Music Issue with lettering by Bráulio Amado and photos by Erik Madigan Heck

This weekend, New York Times Magazine launches a Music Issue. With design by Jason Sfetko and the New York Times magazine team, lettering by Bráulio Amado and photos by Erik Madigan Heck, the issue spans prints and digital.

Among the content is a curated playlist of “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going” executed digitally across a wide pale orange banner with white block lettering overlaid with animated black characters by Bráulio. The playlist, contained digitally on an expanding bright pink left hand side bar, is compiled of tracks from Future, Kelela and Adele accompanied by essays by Margo Jefferson, Wesley Morris, Angela Flournoy and more. In the introduction, story editor Nitsuh Abebe considers the link between ethnicities and genres in American popular music. “In 2017, identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music… But if you look through the essays in this magazine, you may notice two things. One is that, unbidden and according to no plan, they find themselves continually reckoning with questions of identity. The other is that they’re doing this because the musicians are, too.”

“Artists have to figure out whom they’re speaking to and where they’re speaking from,” Nitsuh concludes. “The rest of us do the same. For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”